“You’ll only have to take it for a little while longer,” I said.
“How long?”
“A day—two days.”
“Jesus, I don’t think I can take it.”
Her eyes telegraphed the worry and confusion that was supposed to be gnawing at her. Then I pulled her tight to me and looked down over her shoulder. On the table, the third ashtray was empty. In the split second of my discovery, laughter bubbled in me. I felt like the cornball dick in a half-hour detective opera, burning his eyes out for the usual clues, the little signs, the impossible, ridiculous, expected gimmicks of storybook investigation. But the laughter simmered down and died in my gut. I saw what I hoped for. There were several lumpy shreds of brown and stringy tobacco on the slick surface of the table.
I fought down the dirty names that rose in my throat. There would be time for hot words a little later in our dramatic joust. Right now I struggled to keep it crisp and enjoyable, in the way that a director might relish watching the try-outs for a bit part in a Broadway play. It tickled me to see that she was steering me back to the couch and sitting close to me again and leaning into me to show me how her body trembled.
On the floor, near the white pompom of her slipper, there were more tobacco curlings.
“Don’t let it throw you,” I told her, letting her bury her scented head on my shoulder and then kissing her when she brought her head up. “This place isn’t so bad. Matter of fact, I think it’s quite comfortable.”
“That isn’t it, Mike,” she whispered tragically. “The whole crazy set-up scares me.”
“You’re still worried about Bruck?”
“You know I am.”
“Suppose I told you to forget about him?”
Her body went cold again under my hand. Or was it only the reflex stiffening of her figure as she pulled herself up and away from me? She was staring at me, her bright eyes a mixture of confusion and incredulity. Her play-acting might have been genuine yesterday, but right now it was as phony as an eight-year-old wearing falsies.
“Are you serious?” she asked.
“Forget about Rico Bruck.”
“But how can you say that, Mike?”
“I can say it because I know he doesn’t give a damn about you anymore. Rico and I had a little talk.”
What flickered in her bright eyes now? In the split second it took to drop the few words, a spark of caution seemed to flame. Or was it fear? But it faded fast, to be replaced by her tender smile, complete with the full view of her little white teeth, a symbol of girlish relief. Her husky laughter followed, and then she was leaning over me again and telling me her joy with her body and her mouth. I let her go the full course. She was stalling for time. She was laying into me, using her phony passion to prepare herself for the next move in my little game. My imaginative double talk goosed me into strange and subtle paths of thought. She would be a strange and misfit bedmate for little Rico. She would be yearning for greater conquests, quietly watching the crowds at the Card Club, making her pitch for the more important types, because Toni Kaye yearned for show business passion, complete with all the side dishes.
“Then Rico knows all about us?” she asked.
“He knows—and he doesn’t give a damn,” I lied. “All Rico wants is a small cluster of diamonds, Toni. Rico has a one-track mind, or didn’t you know?”
“I know him well.” She shivered. “But I never heard him mention diamonds.”
“Not even the Folsom pendant?”
“What’s the Folsom pendant?”
“Don’t you read the papers?” I asked.
“I must have missed that story.”
“Not if you read the headlines.”
She had made her first mistake, but her shrewd and conniving brain picked it up. And fast. She assumed a thoughtful and serious air and snapped her elegant fingers and suddenly remembered all about the Folsom pendant.
“The big robbery in Chicago. Of course,” she said.
“Now you’re back on the beam again. You must have heard some gossip about it in the Card Club.”
“Rico never mentioned it to me.”
“And how about Gilligan?”
“Gilligan? I hardly know him.”
I got off the couch and lit a cigarette and walked to the corner of the room where the bottles were. I filled a glass and let her watch me and wonder about me. She was uncomfortable in the gap of silence, just the way I wanted her to be. When the chips are down and the quarry is cornered and trembling, dead air can solve many problems. It was an old police trick I had learned long time ago. You drop the bait. You sit and wait. You are in the position of a professional psychologist who knows the mechanics of emotion. I had needled her skillfully, pricking the nerve ends of her secret self. It was time for the knife now.
“You know him,” I said.
“Well, of course I know him, Mike. But only casually.”
“You know him well.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, still trying for fresh laughter. But the impact of my deadpan stare was bringing her off the couch. She bounced to her feet with a nervous leap. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not trying. I’m saying it.”
“That I know Gilligan well?”
“Intimately.”
“But you’re all wrong, Mike.”
“You’re lying,” I said flatly, moving closer to her. “You and Gilligan are close enough for playing games.” She stepped back from me, the upset shining in her big eyes, riveted on me with the fascinated stare of a rabbit watching a cobra. And when I grabbed her, she went stiff and tight. “Bedroom games,” I added.
“That’s fantastic,” Toni said, whipping herself the other way, out of my arms and back toward the couch. Now the dramatics were pitched high and tense and her impatience with me came through with exaggerated gestures. I had grabbed her hard and she worked to rub the hurt away, massaging her arms where my fingers had bit into them. Her mouth curled in a disdainful smirk and her face clouded with intemperate evil. “If you want to be jealous, pick somebody logical, Mike. Pick somebody I really like. But not Gilligan.”
“I’ll stick with Gilligan.”
“But why? I can’t understand what’s happened to you.” Now her voice softened and quivered and she moved again. I was in the easy chair near the window and she drifted my way and showed me her damp eyes. She sat on the arm and when she put a hand on mine, her fingers were as cold as a plucked chicken. She breathed hard. But her histrionics were all stale and old now. I let her have her fun, listening to her sobbing sorrow, her play-acting at the role of chastened ingénue. “What’s come over you, Mike?”
“Gilligan,” I said, and grabbed her wandering hands. I spat the word in her face and enjoyed watching her freeze on it. I said it again with variations. “Gilligan was here, wasn’t he?”
“Now I know you’re out of your head.”
“I’ll play it again. Gilligan was here.”
“You’re hurting my hands.”
“I’m going to break them unless you open up for me.” I pulled her down closer to me, so that her face became a Benda mask, a caricature of frightened womanhood. And when I could count the eyelashes around her beautiful eyes, I said it again. “Gilligan was here. Admit it.”
“It isn’t true, Mike.”
So I slapped her high on the right cheek. The flat crack of my hand sent her falling back into the chair and her face went dead and cold under the power of the blow. Something glowed deep under her mascaraed eyes, an animal violence that died quickly, to be replaced by a more feminine reaction. Tears. She would begin to sob and moan now, and I didn’t want it. If I was right about her, I wanted the news fast; quick enough so that I could use it. But she was lapsing into trembling terror now, and I couldn’t afford to allow her to promote the mood. I grabbed her again and jerked
her to her feet and let her feel the weight of my purpose.
And when she began to whimper, I slapped her again.
She ran into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. She expected me to stay where I belonged, in the living room, listening to her subdued whimpering. So I followed her inside. She was on the bed, her head buried in the pillow. I sat alongside her and jerked her around so that her tear-stained face looked up at me. The dewy sorrow had blackened her cheeks with mascara and there were two burning spots high on her jaws, brighter than she could ever make them with artificial color. The room was lit only by the subdued radiance from outside, the intermittent blinking of an electric sign on the hotel across the street.
“Please, Mike,” she murmured. “You hurt me.”
“I haven’t begun to play yet. Gilligan was here,” I said. “Admit it.”
I grabbed out at her and pulled her upright. I swung her around and suddenly she was all animal. She clawed for my face and her nails knifed my neck and I heard her mutter a foul and evil name. She bounced off the bed and slid to the right and fell to the floor where her luggage lay. Her hands were groping for something down there, but she didn’t have the time. She might have been reaching for an automatic. She might have been diving for a hidden knife. She found nothing but the hard edge of my hand as I tugged her away and hit her again.
It was enough to wilt her. She was all limp and loose when I lifted her to the bed. She was out. Cold.
I doused her with a glass of water and stood back to watch her eyelids flicker and move back into Consciousness. She squirmed slowly on the sheet and the muscles around her mouth worked hard to bring her face under control.
“You big bastard,” she said.
I went to her luggage, flipped it open and pulled out a small and dainty revolver, buried under her silken slips. She came awake when I showed it to her, when I put the muzzle close to her cheek and let it linger there. She backed deep into the pillow and stiffened as I followed her.
“Now, about Gilligan,” I said. “He was here. I know he was here because I found traces of him, don’t you see? He left some of his stinking collegiate tobacco around. He tapped his pipe in the wrong places, a habit he has out of schoolboy days. He was up here today, because you damn near broke your neck getting his tobacco shreds out of the room when I called Izzy Rosen, remember? You became the neat and fussy type all of a sudden, and that was what started me thinking about Gilligan.”
“Very clever.”
“I get better as I go on,” I said. I dropped the gun so that the cold steel rested above her heart. I dug in with it. “You called Gilligan after I left to meet Izzy, didn’t you?”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Am I? Want me to check with the switchboard downstairs?”
Something died in her eyes. I didn’t push her anymore. I stood over her and let her simmer down. She was cracking completely, trembling now, kneading her hands and shaking her head hopelessly. This was no act. Her little game was over and she knew it. It came through to me in her softening sadness, the fire dead inside her, the strong wall of her purpose crumbling and ruined. She tugged her blouse around her and continued to stare at the corner of the rug, sobbing real sobs how, the feeble, halting signals of feminine breakdown.
“I called Gilligan,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“I was working for him, Mike. All the way from Chicago. He wanted me to stay with you, to throw a pitch for you the minute you walked into the Card Club. He paid me a lot of money for the job.”
“What else?”
“That’s all I know.”
“How many times did you see him since we arrived in New York?”
“Only twice.”
“Where?”
“At the Brentworth, yesterday—when you were tailing the fat man.”
“He came to our room?”
She broke it down for me, all the way. Gilligan had paid her a visit to give her instructions, to warn her that she must stay close to me and keep him informed. But Toni knew nothing of his purpose. I barraged her with questions. How about Bruck? Was Bruck in the deal, too? Was Bruck paying off for Toni to follow me? No, she had her orders only from Gilligan. How much was Gilligan paying? Two grand, plus a promise to get her started in show business.
“And what did Gilligan want this morning?” I asked.
“More information. He questioned me about the Linda Spain murder. He wanted to know whether you had told me anything about it, anything at all.”
“He must have been disappointed.”
“He didn’t stay long.” Toni squirmed on the bed, uncomfortable now, as though the memories of her intimacy with Gilligan were eating away at her mind, reminding her of her cheapness. She leveled her eyes at me and something of her original softness crept back into her gaze, the warmth and excitement she had used on me back in the Card Club. But the old charm was gone for me, and she knew it. She sat there, chewing her lip and saying nothing. The flush of excitement still glowed around her, promoted by the bright and shining fever in her eyes. From here on out, she could be mine all the way. And out of the deep well of my subconscious, some subtle force pulled me her way, toward the yielding lips. But reason slapped me back to the immediate present.
“Get dressed,” I said.
“Must I, Mike?”
She got up, saying nothing, the hopelessness filling her face. She took off her blouse and stood there for a tick of time; a last desperate try. But how could she know that I was thinking of Izzy Rosen at that moment? How could she know that my stomach knotted when I thought of him on the floor in Wragge’s apartment, the blood spilling out of him? How could she guess that the sight of her pink and tender skin only built great waves of hate in me?
She couldn’t know, so I told her.
I said, “Get dressed, you little bitch. You and I are going out together.”
CHAPTER 25
Sidney Wragge’s Apartment
10:22 P.M.—July 19th
Toni was a nuisance, but an important one, and I could think of no safe nest where I might hide her away until needed. So she stepped at my side, a sulky siren, saying nothing, doing nothing but chain smoke and glare at me whenever my face was turned her way. I cautioned her against making a break in any direction. I warned her that I’d take her down to the station and leave her with Leach’s boys, and she believed me all the way.
She said nothing on the way over to Wragge’s flat in the taxi. Did she know the place? When the cab rolled up to the curbing, she looked out at the apartment with restrained petulance.
“May I ask what we’re doing here?” she said, at the door.
“You may not,” I told her. “Step inside—and keep your dainty little trap shut.”
Once inside, I forgot about Toni.
It was the room that gnawed at my weary brain. I stood flat-footed in the center of the rug. I gawked at the scattered debris on the floor. What had Izzy seen here? What had he found to excite him? The wall bed was down and the sheets and pillowcases rumpled and wrinkled the way I had last seen them. The silence beat at my ears, echoing the rhythm of my anxiety, the pulse beat of my impatience to get on with the search.
“What are you looking for?” Toni asked.
“The lost chord.”
“Very funny. I thought I could help you.”
“The only way you’ll help me is by clamming up.”
She bit her lip and remained silent. It would have been good if she were a helpmate. The game of hunt and squint is always easier with a companion. But what could I tell her to help me find, even if she could be used? What was I looking for? I lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed and let the room sing to me, every small part of it, beginning at the door and advancing through the tiny corridor. I set myself on the short end of a mental microscope and took my mind on a ferre
t’s search of every inch of the place. I built the huge figure of Sidney Wragge out of my meandering memory. I strained and struggled to make him a whole man again, entering his own apartment, coming through the door and across this rug. I sat him in the chair at the window and made him walk through all the casual movements of his life in this nest. Habit would take him to certain corners. Habit might help me mark him, label him, track down the fragile thread of his background. I followed him down the paths I had created for him and the activity warmed me so that I began to sweat, and the walls crawled close to me and tore at my natural claustrophobia. The sweat dripped as I clung to the idiotic game that brought me to my knees on the rug, examining it for God knows what that Izzy might have seen.
Crazy? I must have looked out-and-out stupid to Toni. She got out of her chair and started away.
“Back where you were,” I told her, not looking up above her gams.
“I was only going to get you some water, Mike.”
“Back,” I said. “I’ll get my own drink.”
“Mind if I have one?”
I let her follow me into the tiny kitchenette, stumbling about among the scattered utensils on the gray linoleum. It came to me that I had neglected the kitchen altogether. Had Wragge hidden the pendant here? He might have borrowed a stunt from the farmer’s wife and cached the gems in a sugar bowl or a cookie jar. He might have gone modern and hidden the stones in the ice tray, the way the fiction dicks do it on television. But every container capable of holding anything larger than salt and pepper lay open on the floor.
The water was sickeningly warm, and Toni reached for the trays of cubes in the refrigerator. She made a face at the display of food on the shelves. I pulled her away from the box and stood there, my mind on fire with a sudden thought. Did Izzy see what I was looking at? Had he been just as shocked?
Sidney Wragge’s larder was a challenge. On the lower shelf sat a large bowl and I lifted it out and stared into it.
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